LONG BEACH, CA—Andrew McAfee of MIT says that, sooner or later, our world is going to be heavily populated with robots and androids. “Our machines are demonstrating skills that they have never, ever had before,” he noted onstage at the TED2013 conference on Wednesday. "The day is not too far off that androids are going to be doing a lot of the work we do now.” This is the new machine age.

McAfee, a management theorist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, proclaimed that “this is the best economic news on the planet these days,” for two main reasons. First, he explained, “technological progress allows us to continue this amazing run we are on” in which prices go down and products and quality explode. “This is abundance!” he said. Second, McAfee believes that once the androids take on a large number of job functions, we won’t have drudgery and toil any longer. We will have a new society.

“What could possibly go wrong?” he asks. The future won’t be Skynet. "I'll worry about robots becoming aware and taking over when my computer becomes aware of my printer," he joked.

The economic challenges are perhaps more obvious, McAfee admitted. Machines make it tough to “offer labor to your economy,” and jobs vanish. “Returns to capital are at all time high while wages as percentage of GDP are at an all time low,” he said to the audience. This is ultimately not sustainable, as mass unemployment destroys economies. According to McAfee, we're already seeing that “the middle class is under huge threat” as medium incomes have decreased over the last 15 years.

McAfee suggested that the societal challenges that could result from more androids taking the places of workers are significant. We need only look at the past to see what could happen in the future. Consider two stereotypical American workers and their fates over the last 50 years. First, let’s think about a guy named “Ted,” who is a college-educated professional. He’s at the top of the middle class. The second guy, “Bill,” is a high school graduate and a lower-middle class, blue-collar worker. Since the 1960s, the fortunes of these two workers have diverged significantly, even though they were once quite close. The Teds of the world, according to McAfee, now have significantly higher wages, happier marriages, and lower incarceration rates. Bill’s fate, McAfee said, is nearly the complete opposite. Many “Bills” are unemployed. Their wages are moving them out of the middle class, and no matter which ethnic group of Bills you look at, their incarceration rates are higher. This is where things stand today, McAfee said.

So as we move into a world where technology and androids are ubiquitous, what can we do to address this over the long term? "It's tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines,” he notes. McAfee thinks we will eventually need a guaranteed minimum income for workers. Without this, we lose social mobility and consumers lose the ability to purchase goods. McAfee joked that “socialists” like Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon also believed this was inevitable.

“The plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear,” McAfee told the audience, and that includes the reality that androids won’t be taking our jobs tomorrow. We have time to prepare, and that preparation needs to include increased attention to education and the fostering of entrepreneurship to create new jobs, products, and services. In other words, we need to create more “Teds” and revamp our educational system so that it is no longer satisfied with producing “Bills.” This, McAfee claimed, is the only way to avoid a “world of glittering technology, in a shabby society, with great inequalities.”

Promoted Comments

Now let's say, with a bit of money, anyone could buy a robot that plays the game for you, not necessarily better than anybody in the world, but better than 99% of them. That is to say, even if I spent 30 years of my life studying the game, the robot could still beat me.

Erik Brynjolfsson uses chess as an example here. A sufficiently powerful computer can beat even the best chess players. But it turns out that a human player with computer assistance will beat a computer playing alone. Even more powerful are teams of human players working with computer assistance.

To use Brynjolfsson's terminology, the trick is not to race *against* the machine but *with* the machine. Most people can probably still add value even in a highly automated world. The challenge is figuring out how people and machines complement each other, rather than search as substitutes.

Our current economic system is based on the belief that everyone should always be working and producing value. If the production of value no longer required human labour, we would need to completely change our economic model. If robots were cranking away 24/7 creating valuable products, we would be stupid to insist that, since nobody actually has a job, nobody should get any of those products. Under our current economic system, nobody would have any income, and so all the products produced would simply sit there and rot because "If you can't pay for it, you don't deserve it!"

I haven't figured out a solution to this hypothetical, simplified situation:

Let's say the entire usefulness of a society came down to how good somebody is at playing a game. For millennia, this is okay, it produces winners and losers, some people make a lot more money because they are better at playing the game, but if you study a lot, you can generally do better at the game.

Now let's say, with a bit of money, anyone could buy a robot that plays the game for you, not necessarily better than anybody in the world, but better than 99% of them. That is to say, even if I spent 30 years of my life studying the game, the robot could still beat me.

So I buy this robot and it makes me money(until everyone else buys a robot or dies because they don't have a robot). What do I do with my life now? I am now, by definition (in this simple society) useless.

.......

In our real world, things may be much much more complicated, but people are still primarily valued by how useful they are to society. We scoff at the homeless who refuse to work for a living, deadbeats in parents basements, etc...

What does it mean if no matter how much someone studied or worked hard, they could not contribute anything of 'value' to society?

Trying not to offend people, but what if 99% of the world had the same difficulty trying to find a meaningful job as people with large mental or physical handicaps?

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From the government? That means it's really coming from taxes on someone else's income, who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot.

From companies, through token make-work jobs? That means it's really coming from income taken from someone else in exchange for something of value. Someone who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot. Creating "guaranteed wage" make-work jobs artificially penalizes the company from having that job done more efficiently by automation.

So when I'm replaced by a robot and not working, my guaranteed income is being provided off the back of an ever-dwindling pool of people who have not yet been replaced by robots? At what point do you completely consume that pool of money by paying "guaranteed income" to the people no longer working, and what do you do after that? This all sounds like a guaranteed way to drive *everyone* eventually to the same, minimum, received-income level.

Some people seem to think this money just appears out of the ether. It doesn't work that way. I think this article is describing what is going to be (if not starting to be already) a legitimate problem. But simply saying, "we'll have to give all those people a guaranteed income" is a hopelessly over-simplified answer. What's the real solution?

What can go wrong? We already have people complaining that there are too many people in this world, and not enough jobs to keep them all employed. If we further constrain the job market, can we still call people who don't work as entitled and lazy? We're already there in accusing others of doing something wrong even if it is beyond their control. I fear these robots will be repurposed for other means, to absolve future government from the duty to preserve society but instead to shape to its new owners' dreams.

I don't see how humanoid machines would be of much use (outside a very few types of jobs).

Machines that are purpose built for their task, like those that make and assemble car parts, are what the near future is more likely to bring. Those machines wouldn't be androids though.

The economic point still stands. We've already seen machines taking over low skilled jobs. The future of human employment is surely having a more educated population. This is a very difficult problem that isn't really being given the attention it deserves.

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From the government? That means it's really coming from taxes on someone else's income, who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot.

From companies? That means it's really coming from income taken from someone else in exchange for something of value. Someone who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot.

So when I'm replaced by a robot and not working, my guaranteed income is being provided off the back of an ever-dwindling pool of people who have not yet been replaced by robots? At what point do you completely consume that pool of money paying "guaranteed income" to the people no longer working, and what do you do after that?

Some people seem to think this money just appears out of the ether. It doesn't work that way. I think this article is describing what is going to be (if not starting to be already) a legitimate problem. But simply saying, "we'll have to give all those people a guaranteed income" is a hopelessly over-simplified answer. What's the real solution?

While I think that guaranteed income can work well in traditional societies (see just about every country, including the US), I agree with you in this case.

However, I would also like to point out that the kind of transition that the dwindling need for human labour would necessitate can probably never be done smoothly. Some people may indeed suffer as they remain the last few human workers, but once you reach the tipping point, when androids completely take over, money becomes a useless, even destructive concept. We would have to throw it away, and figure out some other way to distiribute wealth. As a society, we would be exceedingly stupid to insist that nobody gets any of the fruits of the robots' labour, simply because nobody has any income. What should we do, let all those products just sit there and rot because nobody can buy them?

I don't see how humanoid machines would be of much use (outside a very few types of jobs).

Machines that are purpose built for their task, like those that make and assemble car parts, are what the near future is more likely to bring. Those machines wouldn't be androids though.

The economic point still stands. We've already seen machines taking over low skilled jobs. The future is surely having a more educated population. This is a very difficult problem that isn't really being given the attention it deserves.

Well, in the limit, we're talking about androids that can perform anything a human can.

Now let's say, with a bit of money, anyone could buy a robot that plays the game for you, not necessarily better than anybody in the world, but better than 99% of them. That is to say, even if I spent 30 years of my life studying the game, the robot could still beat me.

Erik Brynjolfsson uses chess as an example here. A sufficiently powerful computer can beat even the best chess players. But it turns out that a human player with computer assistance will beat a computer playing alone. Even more powerful are teams of human players working with computer assistance.

To use Brynjolfsson's terminology, the trick is not to race *against* the machine but *with* the machine. Most people can probably still add value even in a highly automated world. The challenge is figuring out how people and machines complement each other, rather than search as substitutes.

I don't see how humanoid machines would be of much use (outside a very few types of jobs).

Machines that are purpose built for their task, like those that make and assemble car parts, are what the near future is more likely to bring. Those machines wouldn't be androids though.

The economic point still stands. We've already seen machines taking over low skilled jobs. The future of human employment is surely having a more educated population. This is a very difficult problem that isn't really being given the attention it deserves.

Unfortunately this is even more difficult than you are suggesting. It is not just low-skilled jobs we are losing. Tech is already eliminating a lot of "medium-skill" jobs. Currently. Here is a recent AP article talking about this:

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From the government? That means it's really coming from taxes on someone else's income, who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot.

From companies? That means it's really coming from income taken from someone else in exchange for something of value. Someone who hasn't yet been replaced by a robot.

So when I'm replaced by a robot and not working, my guaranteed income is being provided off the back of an ever-dwindling pool of people who have not yet been replaced by robots? At what point do you completely consume that pool of money paying "guaranteed income" to the people no longer working, and what do you do after that?

Some people seem to think this money just appears out of the ether. It doesn't work that way. I think this article is describing what is going to be (if not starting to be already) a legitimate problem. But simply saying, "we'll have to give all those people a guaranteed income" is a hopelessly over-simplified answer. What's the real solution?

While I think that guaranteed income can work well in traditional societies (see just about every country, including the US), I agree with you in this case.

However, I would also like to point out that the kind of transition that the dwindling need for human labour would necessitate can probably never be done smoothly. Some people may indeed suffer as they remain the last few human workers, but once you reach the tipping point, when androids compeltely take over, money becomes a useless, even destructive concept. As a society, we would be exceedingly stupid to insist that nobody gets any of the fruits of the robots' labour, simply because nobody has any income.

Agreed. And yet money arose for a purpose - as a means of streamlining the transfer of value. If we get rid of money, we go back to a barter society. And that's not any more practical now than it was "back then". So long as people place value upon things and services, an exchange of value will be expected for each transaction. We can barter, or we can exchange symbolic tokens of value (money).

Or are we saying that, with androids/robots producing everything, "value" will no longer have any conceptual meaning to society? I find that difficult to believe.

Now let's say, with a bit of money, anyone could buy a robot that plays the game for you, not necessarily better than anybody in the world, but better than 99% of them. That is to say, even if I spent 30 years of my life studying the game, the robot could still beat me.

Erik Brynjolfsson uses chess as an example here. A sufficiently powerful computer can beat even the best chess players. But it turns out that a human player with computer assistance will beat a computer playing alone. Even more powerful are teams of human players working with computer assistance.

To use Brynjolfsson's terminology, the trick is not to race *against* the machine but *with* the machine. Most people can probably still add value even in a highly automated world. The challenge is figuring out how people and machines complement each other, rather than search as substitutes.

I see your point, and that is a good way to look for solutions, but I doubt that I could ever beat a computer playing chess alone, even with computer assistance at this point. My 'advice' would just get in the way of the optimum path!

If machines gradually take over labour then the logical solution would be to gradually reform education (and probably increase the spending in it as well) so that more people is ready to go into higher education and succeed. Current technology is useful when it comes to replacing manual tasks and making management easier, but it still cant produce creative ideas, so that's where most people will find a job.

I don't really see any problem, provided the change is gradual enough.

If machines gradually take over labour then the logical solution would be to gradually reform education (and probably increase the spending in it as well) so that more people is ready to go into higher education and succeed. Current technology is useful when it comes to replacing manual tasks and making management easier, but it still cant produce creative ideas, so that's where most people will find a job.

I don't really see any problem, provided the change is gradual enough.

Is it really possible for everyone to have a higher-level, "creative" job? How many such jobs can there be? And what happens as automation increasingly eats into even that niche?

Agreed. And yet money arose for a purpose - as a means of streamlining the transfer of value. If we get rid of money, we go back to a barter society. And that's not any more practical now than it was "back then". So long as people place value upon things and services, an exchange of value will be expected for each transaction. We can barter, or we can exchange symbolic tokens of value (money).

Or are we saying that, with androids/robots producing everything, "value" will no longer have any conceptual meaning to society? I find that difficult to believe.

I don't really know the answer to that (I don't think anyone does), but my argument still stands regardless of whether we use a barter system or currency. Both are simply assessments of wealth. What good is either system, when nobody can buy anything, either by bartering or using currency?

And just wait until IBM's Watson gets 10 more years of development, four Moore's "principle" rounds around the block, gets to 1/16th the current price, and starts putting MDs out of a job. And a financial Watson starts putting brokers out of a job. Etc.

And just wait until IBM's Watson gets 10 more years of development, four Moore's "principle" rounds around the block, gets to 1/16th the current price, and starts putting MDs out of a job. And a financial Watson starts putting brokers out of a job. Etc.

I wouldn't use Watson as an example. These days, Watson is relatively low-tech.

And just wait until IBM's Watson gets 10 more years of development, four Moore's "principle" rounds around the block, gets to 1/16th the current price, and starts putting MDs out of a job. And a financial Watson starts putting brokers out of a job. Etc.

I wouldn't use Watson as an example. These days, Watson is relatively low-tech.

And just wait until IBM's Watson gets 10 more years of development, four Moore's "principle" rounds around the block, gets to 1/16th the current price, and starts putting MDs out of a job. And a financial Watson starts putting brokers out of a job. Etc.

I wouldn't use Watson as an example. These days, Watson is relatively low-tech.

Slashdot had this discussion not too long ago. A great little short story called manna ended up getting posted. It goes into pretty good detail on a worst and best possible outcome for when machines and robots make working no longer necessary.

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From whoever doesn't get replaced by a machine. Or the machine owners. Let's say there was a magical abundance machine that could generate enough for everyone to survive. Guaranteed Income basically says the government would take over the machine and force it keep producing. Sounds sort of socialist.

It's not necessarily as problematic as socialism. Normally socialism runs into a free-rider problem -- the owner of the abundance machine has no incentive to maintain or improve the machine if she never gets paid for its output. But if we actually did pull off a post-scarcity society, people would turn to non-cash incentives, like reputation. See Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for one vision of how this might look. There's also a mildly amusing Scott Adam piece out there about how the rich would totally be willing to pay higher taxes if it got them the equivalent of being able to drive in the carpool lane.

Agreed. And yet money arose for a purpose - as a means of streamlining the transfer of value. If we get rid of money, we go back to a barter society. And that's not any more practical now than it was "back then". So long as people place value upon things and services, an exchange of value will be expected for each transaction. We can barter, or we can exchange symbolic tokens of value (money).

Or are we saying that, with androids/robots producing everything, "value" will no longer have any conceptual meaning to society? I find that difficult to believe.

I don't really know the answer to that (I don't think anyone does), but my argument still stands regardless of whether we use a barter system or currency. Both are simply assessments of wealth. What good is either system, when nobody can buy anything, either by bartering or using currency?

And here we're in absolute agreement. I think that's the fundamental question. A society that embraces the concept of "value" for any good or service will need a means of transferring value, and generating value with which to trade for goods and services. If people are put out of a job, they have no value to trade except through forced transfer from someone who does - and that person is, eventually, going to object about value being taken from them with nothing being perceived as given in return.

So it seems that either we're going to have to go the "Star Trek" route, where "value" becomes an outmoded concept ("Here, have a car" == "Here, have a grape"), or we're going to have to find some way for these displaced workers to generate value with which they can participate in societal trade.

I don't see any other solution than those two. And I have extreme doubts about the former coming to pass in any meaningful form.

And just wait until IBM's Watson gets 10 more years of development, four Moore's "principle" rounds around the block, gets to 1/16th the current price, and starts putting MDs out of a job. And a financial Watson starts putting brokers out of a job. Etc.

I wouldn't use Watson as an example. These days, Watson is relatively low-tech.

Isn't it the nearest to a shipping product that shows inference?

Sorry, I wasn't thinking in terms of shipping products. By current research standards, its very rudimentary, in that it really only does a very shallow form of inference. But these things take forever to turn into products that the public sees.

I think this futurescape cannot come soon enough for Japan with its aged population and lack of children, but what about the rest of us. This bi-furcated future sounds like it will set up for major social and political unrest.

The comment about our education system settling for Bills instead of demanding Teds is ludicrous. It does not take into account a society that wants a lot of Bills which is why the large percentage of my students don't make the effort. In fact the Bills in this country are too expensive, so the top-ranking Teds find it cheaper to build their products 10,000 miles away and ship them because Asian Bills work for peanuts. BTW who will pay for all the robots and infrastructure to automate the transportation systems so that robots can drive the trucks? How will the 1 percent get people to buy their products without jobs? This is where I see the social unrest. A XXI century version of Bastille Day. Maybe the robots will do all the killing instead of the guillotine. Poetic justice!

Now let's say, with a bit of money, anyone could buy a robot that plays the game for you, not necessarily better than anybody in the world, but better than 99% of them. That is to say, even if I spent 30 years of my life studying the game, the robot could still beat me.

Erik Brynjolfsson uses chess as an example here. A sufficiently powerful computer can beat even the best chess players. But it turns out that a human player with computer assistance will beat a computer playing alone. Even more powerful are teams of human players working with computer assistance.

To use Brynjolfsson's terminology, the trick is not to race *against* the machine but *with* the machine. Most people can probably still add value even in a highly automated world. The challenge is figuring out how people and machines complement each other, rather than search as substitutes.

I see your point, and that is a good way to look for solutions, but I doubt that I could ever beat a computer playing chess alone, even with computer assistance at this point. My 'advice' would just get in the way of the optimum path!

Maybe not chess, but checkers? Or art? Or sports? There's probably something you would be a net positive at -- no guarantee of course, but the odds aren't bad.

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From whoever doesn't get replaced by a machine. Or the machine owners. Let's say there was a magical abundance machine that could generate enough for everyone to survive. Guaranteed Income basically says the government would take over the machine and force it keep producing. Sounds sort of socialist.

It's not necessarily as problematic as socialism. Normally socialism runs into a free-rider problem -- the owner of the abundance machine has no incentive to maintain or improve the machine if she never gets paid for its output. But if we actually did pull off a post-scarcity society, people would turn to non-cash incentives, like reputation. See Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for one vision of how this might look. There's also a mildly amusing Scott Adam piece out there about how the rich would totally be willing to pay higher taxes if it got them the equivalent of being able to drive in the carpool lane.

If we truly had no scarcity, we wouldn't even need an economic system: everyone could just have everything. But, unfortunately, we'll still always run into the ultimate source of scarcity: time.

Guaranteed income for workers is a misquote for guaranteed income for humans, surely? Raising the costs of human labour in an economy with a reduced demand for human labour can only possibly reduce the number of human workers.

General-purpose androids might always be more expensive than humans in which case they won't catch on - especially if andriods make raising humans less expensive. If not we might look to history to see what people did as economies became slave based - mostly watching sports and rioting about the results, demanding bread and rioting about the distribution and deeply contemplating spiritual matters and rioting about the differences. And holding wars every summer to capture each other's slaves.

"Guaranteed Income" for humans, as robots take over their jobs. Where, exactly, is this money coming from?

From whoever doesn't get replaced by a machine. Or the machine owners. Let's say there was a magical abundance machine that could generate enough for everyone to survive. Guaranteed Income basically says the government would take over the machine and force it keep producing. Sounds sort of socialist.

It's not necessarily as problematic as socialism. Normally socialism runs into a free-rider problem -- the owner of the abundance machine has no incentive to maintain or improve the machine if she never gets paid for its output. But if we actually did pull off a post-scarcity society, people would turn to non-cash incentives, like reputation. See Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for one vision of how this might look. There's also a mildly amusing Scott Adam piece out there about how the rich would totally be willing to pay higher taxes if it got them the equivalent of being able to drive in the carpool lane.

So the value that is transferred is privilege, replacing material goods. That seems like a recipe for revolution, somewhere down the line.

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.